My name is Natalie Wood. I’m not that Natalie Wood. As I tell people in an easy and morbid joke, “I float better (so far)”. I am a person, a therapist, a daughter, a sister, an ex-wife, a pet-mom, a widow, a white woman in her mid-thirties, non-religious, and a bit woo-woo.

I write when I’m going through something I can’t make sense of. The first collection of stories was TisforTrans.blog. That blog documents my experience of supporting a spouse who comes out trans-female. At the time, I wasn’t finding my story in the literature or internet forums and wanted to create something that would help me and others process what it means to have the life you imagined change because of gender. I’ve grown a lot since that blog and sometimes cringe when I reread it. It was a point in time I cannot take back now and I am glad it’s documented as a reference to where I was, where the world was, and how far we’ve come and still have to go on trans rights.

This blog, NatalieWood.blog is for everything I am after Jeffrey died. Trauma is a before and an after. There was before my ex-spouse came out, and there was after. There was before Jeffrey died, and now there is this bullshit of after. I don’t know what this experience is, but I want to make sure I keep track of it so later I can say “yeah, that actually happened”. I want to document what this loss means for me by chronicling my life after it happened. The only way I know how to honor this grief is to keep living, writing, and finding meaning in the meaninglessness. So here we are.